I Uncovered the First Eroge Ever and it’s THIS?? (LOST MEDIA!!!) 😱
(Available on Bump Combat with photo accompaniment)
(Also on Gaming Alexandria)
One year ago, after weeks of intensive research, I put together a culmination of available knowledge on dB-Soft’s notorious, under-documented 177. My intent was for this to be the first of many projects detailing the cultural role and history of key eroge works. My research into 177 bore fruit for seemingly countless historical forays into the likes of Lover Boy, Lolita Syndrome, Night Life, and Emmy. Information on these titles was somewhat scant to be sure, but there was enough to construct a narrative. Lover Boy was knocked out in a couple days, and in revisiting my list of potential topics I was intrigued by a title I’d popped on there without much thought:
Yakyūken (Hudson Soft, n.d.)

Supposedly this predated Koei’s Night Life and even On-Line Systems’ Softporn Adventure by quite some margin, though the specific date was up for debate if not entirely lost. If I were to talk about PSK’s Lolita: Yakyūken at some point, surely it would make more sense to tackle its progenitor first. This presented a few problems. First, there is not exactly a plethora of information about this primitive eroge. Second, it seems to have left no impact. Third, there was no way to play it. For all I knew, Yakyūken did not even exist in the first place, and if it had, nobody had bothered to back it up. VGDensetsu had collated some basic information and screenshots,[1] and BEEP had acquired a copy in 2015,[2] but these only served to tease me, increasing my appetite for forbidden fruit. The type-in version printed in MZ-700 Joyful Pack only had one page of the code documented online, and a search of previous Yahoo! Auctions listings for either cassette came up empty. But MZ-700 Joyful Pack seemed to turn up frequently, that seemed the best course of action.

Unwilling to wait for it to be listed on Yahoo! Auctions again, I turned to Kosho, Japan’s secondhand bookstore search engine. Finding one listing, without a picture, I took a gamble on a copy of what appeared to be the right issue of MZ-700 Joyful Pack, and patiently waited. A month later, it arrived at my door, and while it looked different from the one I had seen online, I excitedly opened it up, flipping through each page for my treasure. Were I looking into computerised Shogi, Go, and Mahjong, I would have found it. Every type-in was a trainer, solver, or some other supplementary program for these three Japanese board games. The trail turned ice cold. Distraught, I resigned myself to searching Yahoo! Auctions weekly for the correct MZ-700 Joyful Pack or a Yakyūken cassette. After another month, the same tape I had seen on BEEP popped up; HuPack #2 for Sharp MZ-700.

Forty years old. Dirty. Discoloured. Untested. I set up my bid in a panic, shaking with anticipation for the next four days, pleading nobody would top my already high bid. I won, it reached my proxy after a week, it was on its way. Quaking as a leaf in a stiff wind, it arrived. Quickly it dawned on me my tape deck had been broken for years, but some kind folks at Gaming Alexandria thankfully offered to dump and scan it on my behalf.[3] After many months of searching, this seemingly lost progenitor to the entirety of erotic gaming was available again. Nobody particularly cared, but I had the first piece of the puzzle I needed. Tape back in hand, I imported a copy of Miyamoto Naoya’s seminal Introduction to Cultural Studies: Adult Games, the first edition of Bishōjo Game Maniax, Sansai Books’ 35 Years of Bishōjo Game History, and Maeda Hiroshi’s Our Bishōjo Game Chronicle, the only books I could source that made mention of Yakyūken.
Only problem was, what exactly is Yakyūken. Why are we stripping while playing rock paper scissors in the first place?


On the Origins of Rock Paper Scissors

Though now effectively ubiquitous across a multitude of cultures, rock paper scissors type hand games (ken) have enjoyed an astounding popularity in Japan since the eighteenth century. Brought to Japan from China sometime before 1743, the original form of Japanese ken is referred to today as kazu-ken, Nagasaki-ken, and hon-ken (“original ken”). Players sat opposite one another, showed any number of fingers on their right hand, and called out a guess as to what the sum of the fingers would be. The left hand counted one’s wins, and the loser of a set was made to drink a cup of sake. With its specific hand movements, Chinese mode of calling numbers, and embedded rules of drinking, kazu-ken flourished in the red-light district of Yoshiwara.[4] Its exoticism in the time of sakoku and Japanese Sinophilia no doubt contributed to its proliferation. However, the theatrics and, as Japanologist Sepp Linhart argues, ritualistic rules made the game difficult to penetrate for those not in the know, a far cry from the rock paper scissors we know today.[5]

Subsequent iterations of ken remedied the complications through the familiar sansukumi-ken (“ken of the three which cower one before the other”) format.[6] A wins over B, B over C, C over A. In its first iteration, mushi-ken, the frog (represented by the thumb) defeated the slug (the pinkie) which won over the snake (index finger). Itself another cultural import from China, mushi-ken gradually acquired a reputation as a game explicitly for children[7], but what won over it culturally was kitsune-ken, later Touhachi-ken. The kitsune trumps the head of the village which wins over the hunter which kills the kitsune. This two-handed ken was more popular among adults in and out of districts like Yoshiwara, particularly as the basis for libations or stripping.[8] The accompanying song, dance, and act of playing kitsune-ken as a strip-game were known as chonkina, the loser doffing an article of clothing until one was bare. Clearly intended for adult entertainment, chonkina nonetheless made itself known to children in time, as recalled in Shibuzawa Seika’s Asakusakko:

"Two children, standing opposite to each other, after having put together the palms of their hands right and left as well as alternately, finally make one of the postures of fox, hunter or village headman to decide a winner. The loser has to put off a piece of what he is wearing every time, until one of them is stark naked. To see the little children on cold winter days trembling, because one after another piece of cloth was stripped them off is a strange scene which can no longer be seen today."[9]

As the nation opened to foreigners again, chonkina became well known among foreigners, and due to the bad reputation it was bestowing to Japan, it was outlawed from September 1894 onward.[10]

Children’s mushi-ken would go on to evolve into jan-ken, the rock paper scissors with which we are familiar, but the specifics of when and how are unclear and unimportant for our purposes. Jan-ken was the preeminent ken by the end of the Meiji period, and ken on the whole was relegated to the realm of children. However, as a game intimately familiar to nearly all Japanese beyond childhood, the simple, fast-paced trichotomy of jan-ken, alongside its association with punishment systems like drink and stripping afforded jan-ken staying power beyond childhood.[11] It is a game which effectively boils down to luck, allowing for decision-making that, if nothing else, is understood to be fair.


Putting the Yakyū in Yakyūken

It’s October, 1924 in Takamatsu. To break in the new ground at Yashima, nearby industrial companies and technical schools are holding a baseball tournament. In a crushing defeat of 0-8, the team from Iyo Railway (later Iyotetsu) was humiliated by the Kosho Club, composed of students from Kagawa Prefectural Takamatsu Commercial School (now Kagawa Prefectural Takamatsu Commercial High School). [12] Later that night, the teams held a get-together at a nearby ryokan, putting on enkai-gei (“party tricks”). Manager of the Iyotetsu team and senryū poet, Goken Maeda, devised an arrangement and choreography of the 1878 nagauta piece “Genroku Hanami Odori.” The Iyotetsu team danced to shamisen in their uniforms to the delight of those in attendance. This first iteration of what would become Yakyūken (literally “baseball fist”) was based on the Japanese rock paper scissors variant kitsune-ken, but by 1947 it came to reflect now common variant jan-ken.[13] The Yakyūken performance was repeated at a consolation party in Iyotetsu’s hometown of Matsuyama, quickly gaining popularity therein and throughout Japan as the team performed it while on tour.[14]

The camaraderie instilled in audiences by the Iyotetsu team’s dance, and its spread as enkai-gei, led to many localised instances of this new form of jan-ken being performed.[15] The specifics of how prevalent it became are impossible to discern, but what is known is that Yakyūken, as with the earlier kazu-ken and kitsune-ken, became another diversion used as an excuse to imbibe and to disrobe.

野球するならこういう具合にしやしゃんせ　～ソラ しやしゃんせ～
投げたら　こう打って　打ったなら　こう受けて
ランナーになったらエッサッサ　～アウト・セーフヨヨイノヨイ～

It’s 1954. Contemporary Ryūkōka artists Ichiro Wakahara and Terukiku of King Records,[16] Yukie Satoshi and Kubo Takakura of Nippon Columbia,[17] and Harumi Aoki of Victor Japan[18] have all released 78 rpm singles with their own takes on Yakyūken. This musical multiple discovery of a still relatively local song brought into question where it had actually originated, with a photograph of the Matsuyama consolation party cementing Goken Maeda as its creator.[19] With this, Maeda’s original, non-chonkina song and dance came to be understood as honke Yakyūken, the orthodox iteration, the way it was meant to be. As the dance spread, alcohol flowed and clothes were shed. In an attempt to preserve the sanctity of Maeda’s phenomenon, fellow poet Tomita Tanuki established an iemoto system for honke Yakyūken around 1966, formalising its lyrical structure and attempting to preserve Yakyūken as a way, not unlike sumo. As iemoto, Tanuki in effect declared himself to be the highest authority on honke Yakyūken — it did not and would not matter how Yakyūken was actually enjoyed colloquially, only what the iemoto approved of constituted the real thing. At the same time, the city of Matsuyama introduced a new taiko performance — the Iyo-no-Matsuyama Tsuzumi Odori — for that year’s Matsuyama Odori festival. While it was popular, it lacked regionalism, and so in 1970, it was replaced with Yakyūken Odori.[20] It wasn’t just local flavour, however, as the year prior Yakyūken became a national phenomenon for more unsavoury reasons.


Birth of a Sensation: Yakyūken Breaks Into the Mainstream, or Tits Out for TV

Just as in the United States, the 1960s in Japan were marked by an increase in individuals’ buying power and the proliferation of television. Whereas the prior decade relegated television sets to the homes of the wealthy or in street-side display windows, by 1970, 90% of Japanese households owned at least one television set.[21] The penetration of the entertainment sphere into the domestic realm led to a berth of variety and comedy shows, all emphasising the joys of laughter. This proliferation rose concerns among cultural critics in the 1960s, with fears that the often lowbrow, thoughtless humour which frequently lampooned violence and sexuality were unsuited to the home, particularly where children might be watching.[22] Furthermore, such programming was becoming increasingly rote and prescriptive in its approach, thereby lessening its effect with each broadcast, making this new mode of entertainment lascivious and boring. In breaking free of an ever rigid mould, Japanese television’s saviour came in the form of Hagimoto Kinichi and Sakagami Jirō’s comedy duo Konto 55-gō. Pronounced as “konto go-jyuu go gō,” the name’s syllabic tempo, evocation of go-go dancing, and abstruse referencing of baseball player Oh Sadaharu’s 55th homerun of the 1964 season all brought about a rapidity and contemporary sensibility fitting of the pair’s comedic stylings.[23]

From their television debut in 1967, Konto 55-gō demonstrated a dynamic physicality in stark contrast to similar acts, often moving so fast that cameras could not keep up with them, the laughter of the audience sometimes being the only indicator of a punchline’s delivery.[24] While a breath of fresh air, cultural critics lambasted this seeming over-correction as yet again inappropriate for home audiences. On the other hand, audiences adored the duo’s comedy, with renowned Buddhist nun, translator of Genji Monogatari into modern Japanese, and self-described Konto 55-gō fan Jakucho Setouchi (then known as Harumi Setouchi) saying Kinichi and Jirō made her “laugh so much that [her] stomach ached."[25]

This focus on unpredictability, shattering of expectations and conventions, and need to perpetually one-up themselves, Konto 55-gō chased and reinforced the proliferation of what Allan Kaprow described as ‘Happening.’ Originally coined in 1959 in reference to art-related events in which the artist took on theatrical directions and modes of expression, Happenings flourished throughout the United States through the 1950s and 1960s, spreading globally but predominantly in Germany and Japan.[26] In the context of the Japanese television industry, ‘Happening’ was co-opted to refer to anything unscripted — quite the opposite from its intent as a label for deliberate performance — after the early 1968 program Kijima Norio Happuningu Sho (“Kijima Norio’s Happening Show”).[27] To be clear, Happenings in this context were still partially staged just as art Happenings were, but the intent from producers was that Happenings would go off the rails by virtue of a lack of scripting and the co-operation and involvement of audience participants. As other shows and producers chased this spontaneity and carried in the wake of Konto 55-gō’s pioneering transgressions, the stakes became higher and content needed to become more compelling, more novel, more edgy, more risque.

The most critical apex of Happening for our purposes came in 1969 on Konto 55-gō no Urabangumi o Buttobase (“Konto 55-gō Blow away the competition”). It was here that Yakyūken was introduced as a segment of the program, with Kinichi and Jirō facing off against numerous women, each stripping an article of clothing upon a loss. Removed articles were then auctioned to raise funds for children orphaned by traffic accidents.[28] The segment was an enormous hit among adults and children, some critics praising this nakedness as incredibly real, the pinnacle of the Happening.[29] At the same time, just as with all of Konto 55-gō’s antics, many loathed this primetime strip tease wholly inappropriate for children to view, some citing it as a siege against one of the sole bulwarks left against Japan’s growing moral decline, the home.[30] Scorn came not only from without, however, but within as well. Kinichi would later go on to say Konto 55-gō no Urabangumi o Buttobase was his most disliked programme he ever worked on, in no small part due to the Yakyūken segment which brought viewers in not for the comedy of the duo, but for the titillation and obscenity of the Yakyūken act itself.[31] Furthermore, in 2005, Kinichi visited Matsuyama to apologise personally to fourth honke Yakyūken iemoto Tsuyoshitoshi Sawada for misrepresenting Yakyūken. Despite this resentment from Kinichi and some critics, Yakyūken reinvigorated jan-ken into a game with stakes, with merriment, with rules everyone was already familiar with, with a catchy song and dance, that brought the Happening into the real world.

Through Konto 55-gō’s work, Yakyūken presented the same problem that chonkina had in the previous century — a breaking of the boundaries between adult entertainment and the recreation of children. This was no longer bound to the district of Asakusa, but the whole of Japan. Further still, the growing popularity of Yakyūken and its association with Konto 55-gō spread the popular conception of the dance originating as a strip performance, rendering the attempts of Tanuki’s iemoto system to preserve the sanctity of Maeda’s original work increasingly ineffective. The iemoto system only had merit when the associated act could be considered a tradition worth preserving such as tea ceremony or calligraphy. With Yakyūken compromising the cultural zeitgeist as a strip game, it became difficult to consider it a valuable cultural commodity. While it is possible this was the greater underlying reason for Matsuyama’s introduction of Yakyūken Odori to the Matsuyama Odori festival in 1970, it cannot be stated as certainty. What was certain was that Yakyūken was here to stay as a television staple, at least for a moment.

Yakyūken remained a part of Konto 55-gō no Urabangumi o Buttobase through to the end of 1969, afterwards being spun-off into its own program Konto 55-gō no Yakyūken!! From November 26, 1969, thirty minutes of strip rock-paper-scissors littered the airwaves every Wednesday at 9PM until the program was discontinued in April 1970.[32] Yakyūken would not be broadcast on Nippon TV for another two decades, returning on New Year’s Eve, 1993 as part of Supa Denpa Bazaru Toshikoshi Janbo Dosokai (“Super Radio Bazaar New Year’s Jumbo Alumni Reunion”). Though no longer televised in the interim, Yakyūken remained in the cultural zeitgeist as a strip game. While impossible to discern at what point Yakyūken became a mainstay of Japanese pornographic production, it has become ubiquitous — a cursory search of Japanese pornographic clip site eroterest.net gives over 34,000 results for Yakyūken. What is certain is that Yakyūken similarly became not just a mainstay of Japanese erotic video games, but the foundation of the entire industry.


In Which I Finally Tell You About the Video Game Yakyūken by Hudson Soft

With 500,000 yen in starting capital, brothers Yūji and Hiroshi Kudō founded Hudson Co., Ltd. in Toyohira-ku, Sapporo on May 18, 1973. Named after the duo’s favourite class of train, the 4-6-4 Hudson, Yūji and Hiroshi sold fine art photographs of locomotives. In September, the brothers opened a dedicated amateur radio shop, CQ Hudson, which stood at 3-7-26, Hiragishi, Toyohira-ku into the new millennium.[33] After travelling to the US shortly thereafter to market their wares, Yūji saw personal computers on general sale for the first time, inspiring him to bring home a PolyMorphic Systems Poly-88 to Japan and learn to program, taking on two million yen in credit card debt to finance the purchase.[34] Well before the personal computer revolution hit Japan, The Kudō brothers were pioneers. The shops of Akihabara bore no fruit for them, necessitating the Poly-88 import. By 1975, the Kudōs had fully branched out into personal computer products, turning type-in programs into pre-packaged cassette tape releases for the sake of convenience, and becoming early adopters of NEC’s 1976 TK-80 and Sharp’s MZ-80 line of computers.[35] The Kudō brothers also began to start writing their own programs around this time under the development team name Miso Ramen Group.

Hudson released at least thirty-seven games for the MZ-80 line, available occasionally as type-ins in magazines like Micom or in books like MZ-80B活用研究. There was a little bit of everything in Miso Ramen Group’s offerings, from the Maze War-esque Ramen Maze 3D to Othello to Operation Escape, wherein the player had to sneak out of class not unlike Konami’s 1984 Beatles-laden Mikie.[36] In the summer of 1979, Hudson was approached by a computer manufacturer with a proposal to sell their software by mail order with an advertisement in Micom for July 1979.[37] The ads were a success, with the Kudōs recounting later that deposits at the bank took upwards of thirty minutes because tellers thought they might be criminals.[38] Yakyūken’s existence in this initial advertisement makes it plain that the game was developed prior to mid-1979, and the ad was laid bare in a 1996 television documentary special by NHK. Yet Yakyūken’s status as the first commercial erotic game seems to have fallen to the wayside.

The game is incredibly simple, as one might expect from a preliminary type-in program from the late 1970s.[39] The player decides how many articles of clothing they wish themselves to have, not dissimilar from a lives system, and is then introduced to their opponent, Megumi.

わたしめぐみよろしくね。(“I’m Megumi, nice to meet you.”)

A few bars of the Yakyūken song beep languidly from the piezoelectric speaker with a bold OUT!! SAFE!! ヨヨイノヨイ covering the screen. The player chooses グ (rock), チョキ (scissors), or パ (paper). In the event of a tie, the process repeats. Should the player lose, an article of clothing is theoretically removed with no visual indication. Should they win, Megumi is declared ‘out’ and her avatar removes an article of clothing. Shirt, skirt, bra, panties. An eyebrow is cocked when her outer attire comes off, the other joining in twain when her bra comes loose. When she loses her panties, Megumi covers her crotch and shrieks "キャー！！はやくあっちへいって！！" (“Kyaa! Quickly, get out!!”) Game end. The original MZ-80 release was monochromatic, but the later MZ-700 versions were in colour, used to minimal effect. It really is as simple as that.


Who’s on first?

Koei’s first entry in their Strawberry Porno series, Night Life, dominates much of the historical record as the earliest erotic game, particularly in the West. Hardcore Gaming 101, Matthew T. Jones, Wikipedia, and MobyGames (among others) authoritatively claim it to be the first, and on occasion one might see PSK’s Lolita Yakyūken cited in its place, but both works released in 1982, the same year as Custer’s Revenge.[40] ASCII Corporation’s history of the NEC PC-8801 show similar family trees wherein Night Life is the root of all Japanese eroge, its own ancestor being On-Line Systems’ 1981 Softporn Adventure.[41] So too does Pasokon Super Special PC Game 80s Chronicle.[42] When Yakyūken is mentioned by these sources, it is as a possibility, something which might be true but lacks veracity, yet the evidence is plain.

Perhaps Yakyūken was simply too early, releasing before heavy-hitter platforms like the NEC PC-88 or Fujitsu FM-7. The MZ-80 line’s flagship was the MZ-80K, released in 1978. It was available only as an assembly kit, which, coupled with its high retail price of ¥198,000, left it in the realm of the enthusiast and academic (particularly engineering students).[43] While games were blatantly possible on the platform, they were far from the focus, limiting the audience for Hudson’s games, particularly Yakyūken, dramatically. Further still, it was sold primarily through mail order, advertised in niche magazines without pictures. Hudson got paid, and quite well at that, but orders came for a litany of their products. Without knowing this was an explicit game, the prospect of playing digital jan-ken must have paled in comparison to Othello or Hudson’s more arcade-style offerings. By the time it came to the next generation on 1982’s MZ-700, the floodgates had already been opened, and platforms capable of graphics dominated the eroge space.

Perhaps Night Life and Lolita Yakyūken take the historiographical spotlight because they lack the primitiveness of Yakyūken. There is no denying that Yakyūken lacks the graphical fidelity of its descendants. Bound by the 80 column by 50 row display of the MZ-80K, space is limited, colour an impossibility, and everything is comprised of text characters as the hardware could not display graphics. The Japanese character ROM bears no curvilinear shapes apart from circles.[44] The hand signs are malformed, and though your opponent, doesn’t look bad per se, her rectangular body’s attempt at an hourglass figure is not exactly stunning. As games writer Yoshiki Osawa described it in the 2000 book Bisyoujyo Game Maniax, [sic] the visuals lack gender specificity, and exhibit a crudeness that cannot even be called ASCII art.[45] Compared to the full colour illustrations of PSK’s Lolita Yakyūken or even the silhouettes of Night Life, Yakyūken comes up short.

Perhaps Yakyūken was too outdated to catch on without some additional gimmick such as lolicon artwork. The original dance craze had occurred a quarter-century earlier, and it had been barred from television for nearly a decade. By the admission of MZ-700 Joyful Pack, Yakyūken was unlikely to resonate with those who did not grow up in the postwar period. A craze to be sure, but a craze for a generation past, one which had little interest in computing. The type-in’s accompanying text even had to make explicit that Yakyūken had virtually nothing to do with baseball, despite its name, as well as the fact this was a game of chonkina.

What these comparisons ignore is that stunning the world was not necessarily Yakyūken’s purpose. Though sold commercially, projects in its vein from Hudson were as much at home on cassette as they were printed as type-ins. By having their code laid entirely bare, type-ins meant hobbyists dabbling in a brand new technology could visually see and alter the program. The type-in’s purpose was to demonstrate what a computer could do. A user could change Megumi-chan into a man, increase her bust size, style her hair. Perhaps they could do away with jan-ken and replace its symbols with those from Touhachi-ken. Why not increase the number of options available for some digital Rock Paper Scissors Lizard Spock? Just as type-ins are used to teach today, so were they then — deliberately open ecosystems in which to learn. Night Life and Lolita Yakyūken were as walled gardens, the magic unable to be discerned.


In Which I Admit This is All Pedantry and Ultimately Does Not Matter

The fact of the matter is that this is all pedantry and ultimately it does not matter. While monumental firsts are readily recorded, the more niche the subject matter, the more abstruse the truth of a first becomes. Any history student can tell you this after a course on historiography and the historical method. The fact of the matter is that what comes first is arbitrary, determined by fallible, biased humans trying to further an argument.

The search for historical firsts has overtaken much of contemporary historical scholarship, and the problem with this is that there is invariably always an earlier example, and the argument of something as coming earlier is increasingly valueless. Certainly there will always come a true first, but how can we know it is certain with an always imperfect historical record? Does it matter if something came first if it was too ahead of its time? Would we be better off as historians focusing more on moments of critical mass as others in adjacent fields do, such as Marek Zvelebil did in his research on agricultural innovations in the archaeological record?[46] Who is to say. What I can say for sure is that I sincerely hope Yakyūken is not the first commercial erotic game. I hope to be disproved at some point in the future. I hope that in trying to set the record straight in this one instance, it can be set straight in another. I hope the drive for better histories never ends, and that at some point we can dwell less on firsts, and more on more critical narratives in games history, cultural history, human history.

__________________________
[1] Video Games Densetsu, “Yakyūken / 野球拳, Probably the First Erotic Video Game Ever Released.,” Tumblr, November 18, 2016, https://videogamesdensetsu.tumblr.com/post/153336334460/yaky%C5%ABken-%E9%87%8E%E7%90%83%E6%8B%B3-probably-the-first-erotic-video.
[2] “【宅配買取】MZ-700用野球拳（ハドソン）を宮城県仙台市のお客様よりお譲りいただきました｜BEEP,” BEEP, April 16, 2019, http://www.beep-shop.com/blog/5921/.
[3] “Hudson Soft - HuPack #2 (Featuring Rowdy-Ball and Yakyūken)(Scans + GameRip) : Hudson Soft,” Internet Archive, July 1, 2023, https://archive.org/details/Hudson-soft-hupack-2.
[4] Sepp Linhart, From Kendô to Jan-Ken: The Deterioration of a Game from Exoticism into Ordinariness (SUNY Press, 1998), 322-323.
[5] Sepp Linhart, “Rituality in the Ken Game,” Ceremony and Ritual in Japan, (2013): 39. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203429549-10.
[6] Linhart, “Rituality in the Ken Game,” 39.
[7] Kitamura Nobuyo. 1933. Kiyu shoran. 2 vols. Tokyo: Seikokan shoten, quoted in Linhart, From Kendô to Jan-Ken, 325.
[8] Stewart Culin, Korean Games with Notes on the Corresponding Games of China and Japan (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania, 1895), 46-47.
[9] Shibuzawa Seika. 1966. Asakusakko. Tokyo: Zoukeisha, quoted in Linhart, From Kendô to Jan-Ken, 334-335.
[10] Hironori Takahashi, “Japanese fist games” (in Japanese): Osaka University of Commerce Amusement Industry Research Institute (2014): 203.
[11] Thomas Crump, Japanese Numbers Game (London: Routledge, 1992). 146.
[12] “本当は脱がない「野球拳」 松山発祥、90年の歴史,” 日本経済新聞, June 29, 2014, https://www.nikkei.com/article/DGXNASFG230DO_V20C14A6BC8000/. Accounts seem to differ on the final score, with some sources claiming it was a 0-6 defeat, others 0-8. As 0-8 is cited by the fourth Iemoto of Yakyūken, that is the number I have decided to use.
[13] Takakashi, “Japanese fist games,” 204-205.
[14] Takakashi, “Japanese fist games,” 204-205.
[15] Takao Ohashi, “A Trademark Registration for ‘野球拳おどり’ (Yakyu-Ken Dance ) - パークス法律事務所,” パークス法律事務所 -, December 9, 2021, https://pax.law/topics/blog/1242/.
[16] 野球けん 若原一郎・照菊, YouTube (YouTube, 2023), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H58uhkoQrbo.
[17] 久保幸江・高倉敏 野球拳, YouTube (YouTube, 2015), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Xdfh4dBWeM.
[18] 靑木 はるみ ♪野球けん♪ 1954年 78rpm Record. Columbia Model No G ｰ 241 Phonograph, YouTube (YouTube, 2022), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycCAK69hc7w.
[19] “本家 野球拳,” GMOとくとくBB｜運営実績20年以上のおトクなプロバイダー, accessed October 2, 2023, http://shikoku.me/iyo-matsuri/raijin/honkeyakyuuken/history/index.html.
[20] “松山野球拳おどりのあゆみ,” 松山野球拳おどり 公式ホームページ, accessed October 2, 2023, https://baseball-dance.com/about/story/.
[21] David Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday: Konto 55-gō and the Teleivision Comedy of the Late 60s” Japan Studies Association Journal 15, no. 1 (2017): 24.
[22] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 24.
[23] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 28.
[24] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 28-30.
[25] Harumi Setouchi, “Tondari hanetari… Konto 55-gō no gei to sugao,” Oh! (August 1968): 176-177, quoted in Humphrey: “Shattering the Everyday,” 30.
[26] Allan Kaprow, “The Legacy of Jackson Pollock (1958),” in Essays on the Blurring of Art and Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1-9.
[27] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 32.
[28] “欽ちゃん「もっとも嫌いな番組だった」 ２人の芸風の違いが浮き彫りになった「裏番組をぶっとばせ！」,” イザ！, September 4, 2018, https://www.iza.ne.jp/article/20180904-HGNF6BYZ5VLH5CV54ZLQFEC2MA/.
[29] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 36-37.
[30] Humphrey, “Shattering the Everyday,” 37.
[31] イザ！, “欽ちゃん”
[32] マスコミ市民 : ジャーナリストと市民を結ぶ情報誌 (36)
[33] “Company Information,” Hudson Soft, December 11, 2000, Internet Archive, https://web.archive.org/web/20001211040400/http://www.hudson.co.jp:80/coinfo/history.html; Brian Eddy, “Video Game History 101: Hudson Soft,” New Retro Wave, January 30, 2017, https://newretrowave.com/2017/01/30/video-game-history-101-hudson-soft/.
[34] Damien McFerran, “Hudson Profile — Part 1,” Retro Gamer Magazine 66, (2009): 68; スペシャル 新・電子立国 第4回 「ビデオゲーム」 ～巨富の攻防～ (NHK, 1996), streaming video, 40:16, Internet Archive. There are conflicting accounts on why Yūji went to the United States and what his first computer was. The information cited here comes from an interview with Yūji himself. Doug Carlston claims that his first computer was actually a SBC80, followed by an IMSAI, but I have not found further evidence to support this claim. See Doug Carlston, Software People: Inside the Computer Business (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1985), 253-257.
[35] The specifics of the timeline become unclear around this time; Japanese microcomputers weren’t commercially available for consumers until mid-1976, yet Hudson’s own company history has them pegged as making PC cassettes and equipment in September 1975.
[36] スペシャル 新・電子立国 第4回, 45:10; “エスケープ大作戦 ,” Animaka.sakura.ne.jp, accessed October 2, 2023, http://animaka.sakura.ne.jp/MZ2000/escape_daisakusen.html; Naoki Miyamoto, Erogē Bunka Kenkyū Gairon (Tōkyō: Sōgō Kagaku Shuppan, 2017), 18-19.
[37] マイコン, July 1979, 11.
[38] スペシャル 新・電子立国 第4回, 45:41.
[39] A full playthrough of the MZ-700 HuPack #2 version is available here: https://youtu.be/M6Emyk5_-jY
[40] “Eroge / Hentai Games,” MobyGames, accessed October 2, 2023, https://www.mobygames.com/group/2508/eroge-hentai-games/; “Eroge,” Wikipedia, September 27, 2023, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eroge; Matthew T. Jones, “The Impact of Telepresence on Cultural Transmission through Bishoujo Games,” PsychNology Journal 3 (2005): 295; “Retro Japanese Computers: Gaming’s Final Frontier,” Hardcore Gaming 101, accessed October 2, 2023, http://www.hardcoregaming101.net/JPNcomputers/Japanesecomputers2.htm.
[41] 蘇るPC-8801伝説 永久保存版 (Tōkyō: ASCII, 2006), 212.
[42] Mesgamer, “日本最古のエ□ゲー！ハドソンの野球拳を語るの！,” 顔面ソニーレイなの！, accessed October 2, 2023, https://mesgamer.hatenablog.com/entry/2022/02/21/173437.
[43] Sharp, Sharp 100-Year History, (2012), 6-08.
[44] “80k Download - Roms,” MZ, accessed October 2, 2023, https://original.sharpmz.org/mz-80k/dldrom.htm.
[45] 美少女ゲームマニアックス (Tōkyō: Kirutaimukomyunikēshon, 2001), 66.
[46] See Marek Zvelebil, “Transition to Farming in Norther Europe: A Hunter-Gatherer Perspective,” Norwegian Archaeological Review 17 (1984), 104-127.

Played during the Backloggd’s Game of the Week (19th Sep. – 25th Sep., 2023).

In 2008, M2 developed a remake of Fantasy Zone II: The Tears of Opa-Opa (1987), reinterpreting the title on System16, one of Sega's arcade boards, whose only modification was the addition of some RAM. This philosophy, at the crossroads of nostalgia, authenticity and creativity born of technical limitations, is perhaps what largely informed the development of the Aleste Collection (2020). Rather limited in scope, the compilation lacks some beloved titles such as Musha Aleste (1990) and Super Aleste (1992), but perhaps the idea was to focus on the transformation the series underwent with the transition onto the Game Gear. The console's technical capabilities mechanically mellowed the series' difficulty, and it was this aspect that Manabu Namiki wanted to emulate for this unique sequel [1].

The title feels like a tribute to another era of shoot'em ups that preceded the success of the CAVE titles. Although GG Aleste 3 never achieves the extraordinary difficulty of danmaku games, the title does offer some engaging sequences thanks to its visual atmosphere and mastery of the Game Gear. The high quality of the assets almost makes it easy to forget that this is an 8-bit game, the most obvious expressions of which are the tone of the sound chip and the inevitable slowdowns caused by such a demanding title. This Game Gear spirit also accounts for the relative simplicity of the enemy patterns: the Special mode certainly requires a more cautious strategy, since the enemy fires a revenge bullet after being killed, thus neutralising some of the secondary weapons, but GG Aleste 3 never feels difficult or unfair.

Some sequences can drag on a little too long, but GG Aleste 3 makes up for it with some impressive setpieces. Wave 5 is particularly effective, with the missile's ascent and the air currents creating actual dogfights. There is something anachronistically delicious about the contrast between the soaring cinematography of this chapter and the antiquated hardware. In an interview, the creators were asked to reflect on the state of shoot'em ups in the Reiwa era. GG Aleste 3 is probably less a revolutionary contribution than a statement in favour of diversifying the concepts explored, especially when compared to independent productions. Nakimi concludes with the following observation: 'I think that freedom and breadth of action have been central concepts for shoot'em ups, but that they have been forgotten. [Nowadays] there are so many games where enemies shoot fireworks that you have to avoid, there is no reason for us to make another one – and the Game Gear would not be able to run it anyway. We were not trying to go back in time, but rather provide a variety of flavours' [2].

__________
[1] '『GGアレスタ』シリーズ大鼎談！ シリーズのキーマン小玉氏、並木氏、ナカシマ氏が裏話を語り尽くす', on Dengeki Online, 14th January 2021, consulted on 25th September 2023.
[2] Ibid (personal translation).

https://i.gyazo.com/76525f4af06a9a6194b6128055fe48d8.png

yeo's environmental design, soundtrack direction, and laissez-faire approach to 'structure' elevates the somber and dour proceedings here and the title's very much so animated by its refusal to guide the player in any strict sense. it's commendable how driven yeo is towards theme and feeling and the world has just enough in the way of flourishes to stimulate a sense of role-playing but too little to fully and succinctly become immersed in; yeo does well to play with this disconnect, causing the complete and utter listlessness of the game to swell and swell and continue to swell prior to the game's climax (if you could call it that) on a frigid november day

on the other hand...there's a dearth of particulars here for me to really feel invested in or compelled by. backtracking here: ringo ishikawa's ultimate success lies in a delicate marriage between the formal & aesthetic language of a kunio-kun game, and the - you'll have to forgive the reductive if undemanding comparison - exploratory, life-sim mechanics of something like shenmue. and the idea's so obvious, so axiomatic even in the kunio-kun games that ringo does little to iterate upon that idea, with certain environmental backgrounds and even mechanics feeling directly lifted from its NES progenitor. thrusting the lifesim framework to the forefront, then, is the most transformative quality of ringo and it achieves this by inviting players to test the boundaries of the world and create their own sense of meaning within that structure - that ringo obscures how tightly directed the game actually is only serves to further entrench just how well-considered and intelligent its design is as well. the game is also underscored by honest-to-god literary ambition which all eventually coalesces into an absolutely devastating ending but whatever i digress

point is, stone buddha...bit less going for it. it's a mood piece first and foremost - which, to its credit, its executes with total conviction and belief in the premise - but everything that you'd expect a game which probes into ennui would have is here, which honestly does it no favours. a lack of concrete narrative + good deal of economical prose invites some lovely interpretations, but you can see this specific ending coming a mile away and there's just too little that's actually transformative about it to really have the same sense of emotional resonance

sounds like im ragging but it's still a great time. unpolished sections and inelegant difficulty curve, sure, but it doesn't overstay its welcome and yeo's willingness to eschew conventional game design continues to delight. there's a lot to love about how the mechanics inform the atmosphere and how you eventually build an innate and instinctual feeling for exactly what you're supposed to do (and i particularly did enjoy how rote it felt when finally mastered - that contrast between what's supposed to be kinetic and improvisational versus the reality that you're a slowly advancing turret) but im also unconvinced that that part of the game was supposed to be intentionally monotonous like everyone says or whatever which does make me feel a bit of internal conflict. id bet my apartment on yeo designing the combat with a bottle of beluga going like 'yeaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa'. good for him

     'In a land of clear colours and stories,
     In a region of shadowless hours,
     Where earth has a garment of glories
     And a murmur of musical flowers...’
     – Algernon Charles Swinburne, 'Dedication', 1865.

It took me several years to understand my girlfriend's fascination with translation. At first I thought it was an expression of her bilingualism and that it came naturally to her. She liked to compare texts at her desk, with two books open and bookmarked. I remember seeing Jane Austen and Plutarch, T.S. Eliot and Cicero in different editions. One book she kept coming back to was George Steiner's After Babel (1975), which I later took with me. When I was younger, its seven hundred pages frightened me with their complexity, and I kept the volume only as a souvenir: the spine was cracked from heavy use, and some of the pages were slightly worn and yellowed. These marks identified her presence, her aura, her memory.

     Understanding is a translation

It was only when I was later writing notes on After Babel that I understood what she valued in translation. It is difficult to capture Steiner's theses, since they do not form a grand, all-encompassing theory, but a key idea – formative for the field of translation studies and comparative literature – is that the communication of information is a secondary part of human discourse. For him, each language colours the individual's relationship to reality in a different way, allowing them to express a situated point of view, an otherness of being. As much as Steiner represented an ideal of the Renaissance man for my girlfriend – and still does, in a way, for me – he was not without his faults. His erudition was often the result of clumsy approximations, where it was more important to keep exploring elsewhere than to specialise.

Through it all, he remained the image of a reader, eager to compare and understand the texts he encountered. My girlfriend loved translating and comparing because, in her illness, she found in it a way of travelling and experiencing spontaneously the rich imagination of texts. Compared to the simple act of reading, translation forces the reader to immerse themselves in the text, to decode its signs, to identify cultural markers and to discover the various references hidden within it. A first glance will reveal expressions and objects that refer to a more or less precise period of time; a closer look will reveal word choices and content that were in use a few decades or centuries earlier; the scansion of the text will also make it possible to delimit a style and influences. Translating means observing and experiencing these elements in order to render them as faithfully as possible into another language, knowing that the result will still be distorted.

     Un petit pan de mur jaune and the rock of the Lighthouse

To transcribe is to experience. Certain scenes, conveyed by contemplative narrators, always linger in my mind. In Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse (1927), Mrs Ramsey reads extracts from the famous anthology The Oxford Book of English Verse (1900), edited by Arthur T. Quiller-Couch: each passage, chosen a priori at random, resonates with the previous ones, allowing the reader to enter Mrs Ramsey's consciousness and the atmosphere of the house. The way she picks the verses, as if plucking petals, contributes to the strange languor of the moment [1]. In Marcel Proust's À la recherche du temps perdu (1927), the narrator fantasises about his trip to Venice. However, this vision of the Serenissima is largely altered by Proust's own readings [2] and his desire to leave a mark, however subjective, through his literary account.

Type Dreams is fully aware of this artistic and ontological strength, drawing on the aesthetics of the typewriter and transcription to instantiate moments of contemplation in the present moment. KB0 offered a sublime insight into the relationship between the physical act of writing and existence; as such, I will not elaborate on these issues here. However, I would like to point out that, beyond the systems and anachronical Victorian aesthetics that seem to run counter to technological progress, the choice of texts is part of a veritable journey into the history of human production and Richard Hofmeier's mentality. The exercises are like musical études, and their poetic absurdity contrasts strikingly with the more concrete texts. There is something deeply wistful about these meditations on existence, death, love and memory. Just as the narrator of La Recherche instantiates his life in a literary production – to inscribe it in Time – Hofmeier seems to conjure up a malaise and an absence by transcribing texts that evoke this sorrow.

There are imperfections in the texts that remind the player of their humanity, whether due to the author's playfulness or a simple typing error. These deviations from the norm force the player to grasp their mental universe and compare it with their own. The extracts from Plato's Apologia Socratis (4th century BCE) are given in the translation by Miles Burnyeat and Christopher Rowe. A long debate about the translation of the dialogue seeks to determine whether ἀρετή should be understood as 'goodness' or as 'virtue'. Burnyeat and Rowe have argued, on philosophical grounds, that the correct translation is 'goodness' – but there is no consensus on this analysis [3]. Nevertheless, the choice of this version, rather than a translation from the Loeb Classic or that of Thomas G. West, allows Hofmeier to situate the theme of death and memory within his system of thought. These long extracts can be contrasted, for example, with the inclusion of 'Seeking Feelings for Words' by Felipe Carretoni, a confidential Brazilian writer.

     And I love you so much

The prose poem is addressed to a significant other, acknowledging their presence and the lessons they have taught the author. 'It has been some time now, love, since you taught me what love is,' the poem ends. There are echoes, deliberate or not, in the text of T. S. Eliot's 'A Dedication to my Wife': 'No peevish winter wind shall chill / No sullen tropic sun shall wither / The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only. / But this dedication is for others to read: / These are private words addressed to you in public' [4]. Carretoni's poem unfolds as the keys are struck, while the surroundings in which the typographer finds themselves slowly change. Starting with the empty, colourless room and the window covered by a light rain, it gradually regains its vibrancy as the player's avatar reappears. The act of writing exorcises the memories of a melancholy love. It is impossible to know what Carretoni and Hofmeier actually mean by this poem, but it hardly matters since the interpretation is left to the reader and player.

Both Apologia Socratis and 'Seeking Feelings for Words' remind me so much of my teenage love and the boundless affection she left me. Sometimes it overflows without knowing where to go: Type Dreams, in its mechanically contemplative approach, channeled that flood by conjuring up the virtues and lessons my first love left me – or what I imagine she left me. Over the past few years, I have spent long hours rereading and transcribing the many letters we exchanged. It was a way of reliving the feelings I had once committed to paper, of instantiating her presence once again. I have not done this for a long time, partly because the tenderness and lost love that surrounds me is painful, and perhaps because I have found other ways to honour her memory. Nevertheless, Type Dreams has brought back all those feelings and bared my heart once more.

Type Dreams is an unfinished work. The campaign for the game is not available, as Hofmeier interrupted the development of the game for personal reasons, and only a summary gives an idea of the themes addressed: 'The world's two fastest typists fall in love just as a new century is born'. A love that has nowhere to go and lives only in the imagination. Like Cart Life (2010), Type Dreams touches on everyday feelings with great humility. Typing the various texts with their distinctive tastes was a gentle stab in my chest: I felt the rustling of the trees, the kiss which tasted of the sea, the mysterious photograph by the lake and the walks on the beach all come back to me. And I cannot leave out the words we always used to close our letters.

And I love you so much.

__________
[1] Virginia Woolf meticulously constructed this atmosphere, which echoed her own vulnerability. In On Being Ill (1925), drafted while she was bedridden, she wrote: 'We rifle poets of their flowers. We break off a line or two and let them open in the depths of the mind, spread their bright wings, swim like coloured fish in green waters' (Virginia Woolf, 'On Being Ill', in The Moment and Other Essays, Hogarth Press, London, 1947, p. 19). The hermetic aspect of a poem is increased tenfold by a patient who hallucinates an entire universe.
[2] Proust was greatly influenced by the writings of John Ruskin, especially The Stones of Venice (1853). Ruskin denounced the effects of industrialisation on the Romanesque and Gothic heritage and became a leader of the Gothic Revival, an aesthetic that had a lasting influence on Proust. As such, '[his] Venice is an old provincial town, full of medieval vestiges, where intimate, parochial life is magnified; but it is also a fabulous garden, filled with fruit and birds of coloured stone, blooming in the middle of the sea that comes to refresh it' (Georges Cattaui, Proust et ses métamorphoses, Nizet, Paris, 1972, p. 26, personal translation).
[3] For example, see Joy Samad, 'Socrates’ Pragma and Socrates’ Toughness: On the Proper Translation of Apology 30b 2–4', in Polis, vol. 28, no. 2, 2011, pp. 250-266.
[4] Thomas S. Eliot, 'A Dedication to My Wife', in Collected Poems, 1909-1962, Faber & Faber, London, 1974.

Setsu: We have factual evidence that SQ is Gnosia [Definite Enemy]
Yuriko: I support Setsu's statement, you all should as well [Seek Agreement]
Raqio: So, logically we should vote for SQ immedia-

SQ: CURSE OF RA 𓀀 𓀁 𓀂 𓀃 𓀄 𓀅 𓀆 𓀇 𓀈 𓀉 𓀊 𓀋 𓀌 𓀍 𓀎 𓀏 𓀐 𓀑 𓀒 𓀓 𓀔 𓀕 𓀖 𓀗 𓀘 𓀙 𓀚 𓀛 𓀜 𓀝 𓀞 𓀟 𓀠 𓀡 𓀢 𓀣 𓀤 𓀥 𓀦 𓀧 𓀨 𓀩 𓀪 𓀫 𓀬 𓀭 𓀲 𓀳 𓀴 𓀵 𓀶 𓀷 𓀸 𓀹 𓀺 𓀻 𓀼 𓀽 𓀾 𓀿 𓁀 𓁁 𓁂 𓁃 𓁄 𓁅 𓁆 𓁇 𓁈 𓁉 𓁊 𓁋 𓁍 𓁎 𓁏 𓁐 𓁑

Yuriko: Actually, I think I saw Raqio vent [Exaggerate]
Setsu: Raqio is mad sus lol [Obfuscate]

Raqio was sent to cold sleep

I considered strongly putting together a long-form critique of this game, but the most damning statement I could possibly make about Final Fantasy XVI is that I truly don't think it's worth it. The ways in which I think this game is bad are not unique or interesting: it is bad in the same way the vast majority of these prestige Sony single-player exclusives are. Its failures are common, predictable, and depressingly endemic. It is bad because it hates women, it is bad because it treats it's subject matter with an aggressive lack of care or interest, it is bad because it's imagination is as narrow and constrained as it's level design. But more than anything else, it is bad because it only wants to be Good.

Oxymoronic a statement as it might appear, this is core to the game's failings to me. People who make games generally want to make good games, of course, but paired with that there is an intent, an interest, an idea that seeks to be communicated, that the eloquence with which it professes its aesthetic, thematic, or mechanical goals will produce the quality it seeks. Final Fantasy XVI may have such goals, but they are supplicant to its desire to be liked, and so, rather than plant a flag of its own, it stitches together one from fabric pillaged from the most immediate eikons of popularity and quality - A Song of Ice and Fire, God of War, Demon Slayer, Devil May Cry - desperately begging to be liked by cloaking itself in what many people already do, needing to be loved in the way those things are, without any of the work or vision of its influences, and without any charisma of its own. Much like the patch and DLC content for Final Fantasy XV, it's a reactionary and cloying work that contorts itself into a shape it thinks people will love, rather than finding a unique self to be.

From the aggressively self-serious tone that embraces wholeheartedly the aesthetics of Prestige Fantasy Television with all its fucks and shits and incest and Grim Darkness to let you know that This Isn't Your Daddy's Final Fantasy, without actually being anywhere near as genuinely Dark, sad, or depressing as something like XV, from combat that borrows the surface-level signifiers of Devil May Cry combat - stingers, devil bringers, enemy step - but without any actual opposition or reaction of that series' diverse and reactive enemy set and thoughtful level design, or the way there's a episode of television-worth of lectures from a character explaining troop movements and map markers that genuinely do not matter in any way in order to make you feel like you're experiencing a well thought-out and materially concerned political Serious Fantasy, Final Fantasy XVI is pure wafer-thin illusion; all the surface from it's myriad influences but none of the depth or nuance, a greatest hits album from a band with no voice to call their own, an algorithmically generated playlist of hits that tunelessly resound with nothing. It looks like Devil May Cry, but it isn't - Devil May Cry would ask more of you than dodging one attack at a time while you perform a particularly flashy MMO rotation. It looks like A Song of Ice and Fire, but it isn't - without Martin's careful historical eye and materialist concerns, the illusion that this comes even within striking distance of that flawed work shatters when you think about the setting for more than a moment.

In fairness, Final Fantasy XVI does bring more than just the surface level into its world: it also brings with it the nastiest and ugliest parts of those works into this one, replicated wholeheartedly as Aesthetic, bereft of whatever semblance of texture and critique may have once been there. Benedikta Harman might be the most disgustingly treated woman in a recent work of fiction, the seemingly uniform AAA Game misogyny of evil mothers and heroic, redeemable fathers is alive and well, 16's version of this now agonizingly tired cliche going farther even than games I've railed against for it in the past, which all culminates in a moment where three men tell the female lead to stay home while they go and fight (despite one of those men being a proven liability to himself and others when doing the same thing he is about to go and do again, while she is not), she immediately acquiesces, and dutifully remains in the proverbial kitchen. Something that thinks so little of women is self-evidently incapable of meaningfully tackling any real-world issue, something Final Fantasy XVI goes on to decisively prove, with its story of systemic evils defeated not with systemic criticism, but with Great, Powerful Men, a particularly tiresome kind of rugged bootstrap individualism that seeks to reduce real-world evils to shonen enemies for the Special Man with Special Powers to defeat on his lonesome. It's an attempt to discuss oppression and racism that would embarrass even the other shonen media it is clearly closer in spirit to than the dark fantasy political epic it wears the skin of. In a world where the power fantasy of the shonen superhero is sacrosanct over all other concerns, it leads to a conclusion as absurd and fundamentally unimaginative as shonen jump's weakest scripts: the only thing that can stop a Bad Guy with an Eikon is a Good Guy with an Eikon.

In borrowing the aesthetics of the dark fantasy - and Matsuno games - it seeks to emulate, but without the nuance, FF16 becomes a game where the perspective of the enslaved is almost completely absent (Clive's period as a slave might as well not have occurred for all it impacts his character), and the power of nobility is Good when it is wielded by Good Hands like Lord Rosfield, a slave owner who, despite owning the clearly abused character who serves as our introduction to the bearers, is eulogized completely uncritically by the script, until a final side quest has a character claim that he was planning to free the slaves all along...alongside a letter where Lord Rosfield discusses his desire to "put down the savages". I've never seen attempted slave owner apologia that didn't reveal its virulent underlying racism, and this is no exception. In fact, any time the game attempts to put on a facade of being about something other than The Shonen Hero battling other Kamen Riders for dominance, it crumbles nigh-immediately; when Final Fantasy 16 makes its overtures towards the Power of Friendship, it rings utterly false and hollow: Clive's friends are not his power. His power is his power.

The only part of the game that truly spoke to me was the widely-derided side-quests, which offer a peek into a more compelling story: the story of a man doing the work to build and maintain a community, contributing to both the material and emotional needs of a commune that attempts to exist outside the violence of society. As tedious as these sidequests are - and as agonizing as their pacing so often is - it's the only part of this game where it felt like I was engaging with an idea. But ultimately, even this is annihilated by the game's bootstrap nonsense - that being that the hideaway is funded and maintained by the wealthy and influential across the world, the direct beneficiaries and embodiments of the status quo funding what their involvement reveals to be an utterly illusionary attempt to escape it, rendering what could be an effective exploration of what building a new idea of a community practically looks like into something that could be good neighbors with Galt's Gulch.

In a series that is routinely deeply rewarding for me to consider, FF16 stands as perhaps its most shallow, underwritten, and vacuous entry in decades. All games are ultimately illusions, of course: we're all just moving data around spreadsheets, at the end of the day. But - as is the modern AAA mode de jour - 16 is the result of the careful subtraction of texture from the experience of a game, the removal of any potential frictions and frustrations, but further even than that, it is the removal of personality, of difference, it is the attempt to make make the smoothest, most likable affect possible to the widest number of people possible. And, just like with its AAA brethren, it has almost nothing to offer me. It is the affect of Devil May Cry without its texture, the affect of Game of Thrones without even its nuance, and the affect of Final Fantasy without its soul.

Final Fantasy XVI is ultimately a success. It sought out to be Good, in the way a PS5 game like this is Good, and succeeded. And in so doing, it closed off any possibility that it would ever reach me.

It doesn’t really surprise me that each positive sentiment I have seen on Final Fantasy XVI is followed by an exclamation of derision over the series’ recent past. Whether the point of betrayal and failure was in XV, or with XIII, or even as far back as VIII, the rhetorical move is well and truly that Final Fantasy has been Bad, and with XVI, it is good again. Unfortunately, as someone who thought Final Fantasy has Been Good, consistently, throughout essentially the entire span of it's existence, I find myself on the other side of this one.

Final Fantasy XV convinced me that I could still love video games when I thought, for a moment, that I might not. That it was still possible to make games on this scale that were idiosyncratic, personal, and deeply human, even in the awful place the video game industry is in.

Final Fantasy XVI convinced me that it isn't.

It's easy to take the stuff you own for granted, it seems to go double for games I bought a while ago for PlayStation back when I started collecting physically for it when the prices were all roughly a third of what they are now. Back when Ridge Racer Type 4 was a measly six bucks on a rack at your local place, and the Armored Cores weren't currently being held at gunpoint by swindlers out to speckledorf newly curious modern fans of From Software who don't know what a duck or a station is.

The North American longbox copy of Starblade Alpha is something I already knew was particularly hard to find, because even back in like 2015 or whatever it was (The years started to blend together for me recently) there would only be so many copies online and they were always in rotten shape with the adhesive on the cover artwork being worn out by the dastardly tag team of Father Time and Bad Storage. I eventually ended up finding one in OKAY shape and shelved out decent money for it, primarily because I'm a strange person who absolutely adores the chaos that is the longbox era of PS1 titles. They are big and stupid, I like big and stupid. It should've stayed like this tbh, the uniformity of jewel cases ruined us all.

On topic with the game itself, Starblade Alpha is a port of the classic arcade title that is a massive influence to the rail shooter genre. My first experience with the game was in the vanilla version of Tekken 5 on PS2 that featured the original arcade game as it's loading screen and as an unlockable full game from playing Devil Within. So it's nice at least to have that as my frame of reference when I finally decided to take out the disc from this supposed jackalope of PS1 collecting and boot it up on my console. It's even nicer that I get to talk about Devil Within in a writing piece that has nothing to do with Tekken, but that's me gloating about a personal victory.

As a port? It is a decent bit choppier and uses FMV backgrounds, and unfortunately aiming felt abominable on the dpad (dualshock wasn't even a glint in the milkman's eye at this point). It has two modes, one that uses the original polygon look of the game, and another that remakes it with fully textured graphics. Personally, I prefer the original look since I feel it's rather obvious the ships were made with that appearance in mind. The Commander ship in particular looks like it recently went dumpster diving. I appreciate the effort at least, because otherwise the package is fairly barren like a lot of the early Namco ports during the longbox era of crazy eyes. Surely not a great alternative to the cabinet which is probably an awesome experience.

Well, is it worth the upwards of 300-400 dollars that a CIB copy is going for currently? Oh lord no. Is it neat that I own this? I guess so, it's nice I could sell this thing for a car payment if I end up in a desperate state of near-homelessness, but otherwise it's just another game on the shelf to me, despite how legitimately rare it seems to be, as opposed to some popular title that is obviously being grifted online because companies can't be shittened to give some goddamn respect to the consumer in making their products more accessible in the age of digital. If someone knocked at my door and offered me 500 bucks for it, I would take the offer gladly. If the same person offered me 500 bucks for my childhood copy of Spyro the Dragon, I would immediately respond by coldcocking them.

Maybe I secretly regret owning all this stuff in an age where emulation is a fuckton better than it was a decade ago, but one thing's for sure is that I don't regret at least having something to display my love for the system.

No joke, I care about the sampler disc that came with my PS1 more, which is probably going for McDonalds Happy Meal prices. Attachment can be so bleak at times...

the games master (or dungeon master) has long been one of the most fascinating roles one can play in any game - be it video, table, or sport. a blend of one-person theatre, moderation, improvisational comedy, and game design, with the emphasis on these roles and others besides shifting from person to person, from table to table, it's a truly unique position, and it's perhaps the key thing that makes computer role-playing fundamentally different from tabletop role-playing, even if you're still playing with friends. when a game is your dungeon master, it becomes non-negotiable, unwavering, utterly fastidious, and miserly in its rule-keeping. this is not always a problem if the rules are strong enough - i'm not especially interested in playing a game of Go with a referee who's cool with me eating the opponent's pieces when they aren't looking, except maybe as a one-off - but when the rules are not strong enough, it leaves me craving the human hand of a DM who will gently massage the systems behind the scenes to ensure everyone involved is having fun. and in Fifth Edition, the rules are, assuredly, not Strong Enough.

Fifth Edition Dungeons & Dragons is, bluntly, a poor TTRPG that demands a level of simulationist interest that would bore a 40K player (quick question, has anyone who has ever played 5E ever gave a shit about the carry weight of currency? did you even know that the gold you're carrying around has a weight that you're supposed to manage?) as support to a tactical game that is as shallow as it is torturously prolonged, capped by a social game that is functionally nonexistent. D&D is content to coast by on its cultural ubiquity and the fact that almost all of its player base barely even really knows that other TTRPGs exist, sailing the seas of mediocrity on a boat that starts to sink if you set foot in it for more than a few minutes. it is possible to play wonderful games in D&D, but I have yet to hear of - or be part of - one that was wonderful because it was D&D - rather, they are invariably good in spite of D&D, and always require some degree of selective memory or active rejection over many of the game's outrageously numerous rules.

given this perspective, it's perhaps not surprising that i am not enormously enthused by larian studios' Baldur's Gate III, a game that attempts to faithfully adapt the 5E rules to the broad framework of the studio's last game, Divinity: Original Sin II. but even with that in mind, i find myself genuinely shocked at how unbelievably boring BG3 is.

as the soothsayers on the mount foretold would occur the instant Larian proudly announced their design intentions, marrying 5th Edition Dungeons & Dragons to Divinity Original Sin 2's combat completely hamstrings the latter: the genuinely expressive and reactive toolkit of that game is filtered through a dull interpretation of the most stock spells of 5E, making this less a game of setting up a simple rube goldberg machine to defeat an encounter, and more about tediously playing out the motions of early-game dnd in a world your imagination cannot penetrate.

here's the trick to being a DM: let the players do the hard work. if they come up with a crazy scheme that you never imagined that just might work... who's to say it can't? you and the players are telling this story together, after all. if they want to say what happens next, let them. if they ask if there is a chandelier to swing on, say yes. constraining yourself to a number of set solutions you devise and hope the players find is only making the game less interesting for everyone involved. when the world exists only in your heads, it expands at the speed of thought. anything is possible.

while baldur's gate 3 is a more permissible dungeon master than some games, it remains a prisoner of the imaginations of it's designer. and this is hardly a fair critique to make of a video game, i know...except when it's playing with a ruleset explicitly designed with a lackadaisical, easygoing dungeon master in mind. damning as it might be to say, the easiest way to see the failings of 5E as a set of rules is to play by them, and BG3 offers you no choice but to do so, but without even some crucial features like Ready Actions that narrow it's tactical space even more. original sin 2 nobly wrestled with this thanks to an expansive spell set mostly based on reactions and creating situations, and one wherein you could be doing powerful things very quickly. 5E has so little of this, by comparison, especially in the miserable early levels. all you have is some of the weakest tactical combat in table gaming. and explosive red barrels, of course.

the designers are clearly aware of the reduced capability for the player to interact with the environment, and have accordingly given most major encounters one big object to interact with and defeat enemies with, be it one of the aforementioned red barrels, or a giant rock suspended by a rope above where two men are standing, etcetera. this is, definitionally, reactivity in action, i suppose, but is about as intellectually engaging as putting square pegs in square holes: there's a reason we don't hold a party for every first-person shooter with an explosive barrel in it, why are we holding a party for this one?

it certainly can't be the early-game writing. while certainly I'm gratified that BG3 is less outwardly annoying and in-poor-taste as Divinity 2's edgelord parade, it's seemingly forgotten to replace it with much of anything. BG3's player character must surely be one of the most boring in the entire genre, with nary a hint of personality escaping their suffocatingly matter-of-fact dialogue options, that only on occasion dare to be so bold as to allow the player to be...slightly rude or sarcastic. there's never going to be a CRPG that allows for as much reactivity and input as a dungeon master of flesh and blood, but even within those expectations, BG3 falls utterly flat. so much of the appeal of this genre, to me, is in creating a guy that you can rotate around in your head. but baldur's gate 3 is the kind of DM that is only interested in a PC for the Numbers on their character sheet: the actual Character of the Player Character ceases to be once you complete their creation, and let them loose from your imagination into the confining reality of BG3's world.

(incidentally, BG3 joins CyberPunk 2077 in the prestigious world of 'Games With Character Creators That Give Me Chaser Vibes' with their insistence on embodying transness exclusively via mixing-and-matching voice and genitals on a series of binary traditionally attractive male or female body types. i genuinely appreciate the ability to play as a non-binary character: i don't appreciate the unavoidably fetishistic nature of prioritizing genital customization over any actual input on everyday trans presentation, like binders, top surgery, or even an androgynous voice or two)

with only a solid day's of gameplay under my belt, i can't in good conscience claim to have the full scope of the game's companions, i can at least say that the first impressions they make fall within tiresome cliches we've all had our fill of, i think. or have we? have you?

this is my conundrum with baldur's gate 3. i truly do not think the game is remarkable in any meaningful way: it is not awful but it is a very bog-standard CRPG with a little more messing with the set dressing than is typical for the genre. it is narratively, and mechanically, rote. i have only spent a few hours with it, and already, i am tired of it. just as i am tired of dungeons & dragons.

but maybe you aren't. maybe you haven't played baldur's gate 1 or 2, maybe you haven't played darklands or torment, maybe you haven't played arcanum or underrail. maybe you haven't played pillars of eternity or tyranny. maybe you're someone who got into D&D via Critical Role's explosion, someone who has never played a CRPG quite like this before, and are being introduced to an entire sub-genre with the first true 5E-based CRPG. maybe you still think jokes about Bards fucking Dragons are really funny. i say this with true sincerity (well, maybe not the last one, which was a little mean, and for which i apologize): i am genuinely delighted, on some level, to see a CRPG get this popular. while i truly cannot explain the swathes of industry veterans giving into astonishment on a scale undreamed of with this game, i also know that d&d is much, much bigger than it was when i was first enthralled by dragon age: origins, a game with a similarly rote plot, and still captured by heart and imagination, and that if this is your introduction to the magic of CRPGs, i can see why you give into astonishment. because crpgs can be astonishing.

but i would like for it, and D&D as a whole, to remain an introduction, to not consume the entire conception of the hobby, as D&D has. i am sincerely and genuinely disappointed with the total lack of apprehension the wider critical scene of games has for BG3, given its connection to Wizards of the Coast, a deeply evil company that, just today, admitted to using AI art in the latest D&D sourcebook. i am uninterested in contributing to the breathless hype of an IP owned by a company uninterested in the basic humanity of art and it's creation. not when there are so many other games out there.

you can stay in plato's cave, for a while. you can stay there forever if you want, dungeon crawling up and down the sword coast. but you can also leave that cave, and come into my other cave, slightly next door, where i can tell you about blades in the dark and pentiment. they're really very very cool.

as for me? i turned the game off when i reached a point whereupon, after noticing an obvious trap, i snuck around the skeletons lying in wait to attack and reached the treasure...whereupon the treasure chest spoke to me and told me to fuck off until i had killed the skeletons. fuck off, BG3. why should i bother trying to navigate your encounters creatively when you're going to just say that it doesn't work like that? I've played with dungeon masters like this before, and they aren't good ones. they're the kind of ones who wonder why they can't seem to hold a group together for more than a couple of sessions.

maybe i'll return to BG3, but if i do, it'll only be in multiplayer. with friends, and possibly a drink or two. but if me and three friends are committing to a possible 120-hour RPG...why not just take it a little bit further and just play some actual Tabletop? Why not play something that isn't Dungeons & Dragons? Why not play with a dungeon master that won't be such a spoilsport?

R-Type might be the series I give the lightest jabs imaginable when I want to critique it through written words. It's not necessarily the childhood trauma speaking from a certain SNES iteration whooping my ass, or having a handheld version to strain my eyes on through a screen that cannot be looked at clearly from any angle regardless of applicable worm lights.

I just like good art direction, a lot. It can carry some of the most mid shit ever if it was left to nothing but the bare gameplay elements. That's not to say R-Type doesn't have good gameplay elements, I love the force option, it's actually one of my favorite mechanics in shmups and can lend itself well to proper strategy. Of course however, strategy is something you need to learn and do on the fly, and in shmups you only have so much time to conduct this when obstacles and bullets are thrown at you willy-nilly-vanilly, and failure means a trip back to a potentially poorly-placed checkpoint. Personally, I feel R-Type has a fantastic first half. The battleship stage in particular I think is an amazing piece to really teach the player on how to utilize the force option.

These good vibes though only last so long, because as always arcade agony rears it's ugly head starting at stage six and onward. I think with some elbow grease I could find some hoops to jump through and commit to mental gymnastics to rationalize these last three stages, but the second loop left me in such a bad state that I just can't find the energy to start the circus act. Full disclosure, I effectively beat this game four times today if you count both loops, and I did break down and use save states. With practice I could 1cc the first loop and gain more adoration for this, but that second loop is an obvious trolljob toward MLG gamers who enjoy looking for safe paths/spots in levels with constant bullet sprays that weren't meant to be there originally. It's a shame, because it's obvious how much this influenced god knows how many of it's kind with it's giant vagina bosses, and iconic first stage boss with thousands of names thanks to terrible localization.

"Hey, what should we call this guy?"
"Gladiator. Looks like a gladiator."
"Yeah, I can see that cheddar cheese Xenomorph fighting Samnites in the Colosseum. Absolutely, good idea sir."

Will still never get where that one came from, lol. At least the Bydo will never scare people again. (Spoilers: they scare people a lot more after this.)

First loop fine, second loop bad. Don't do it, I gained five pounds from it.